The Last Days of California: A Novel (17 page)

New Mexico was
going by quickly, dull and flat but otherworldly. There were strange flat shrubs and bunches of small trees I’d never seen before. In the distance, mountains loomed low and jagged. The Jesus billboards had been replaced by billboards telling us not to drink and drive, which our father said was due to all of the Indians. Their bodies didn’t process sugar like ours did, so they were more susceptible to diabetes and alcoholism.

“You have diabetes,” Elise said. “And they’re called Native Americans, not Indians. Indians are from India.”

Our father said he’d never met an Indian
or
a Native American that he liked.

“Hey,” Elise said, and we looked out her window at some dust kicking up.

“Thrilling,” I said, but I kept watching it and it
was
pretty mesmerizing, the way it moved. I’d never seen dirt act so purposefully. I fingered a tiny scrape on my knee from the bottom of the pool—reassurance that I hadn’t dreamed Gabe. I thought about how he’d looked at me, the things he’d said. I thought about his body and his face and the smell of gas in his van. I was going to replay our time together so often I’d have it memorized forever. I was going to replay it so many times I’d never remember any new details.

After that we watched YouTube videos of people driving on I-10 in New Mexico, same as us; most of the videos were shot by a guy who went around the country filming sections of interstate. He’d added various facts and notes at the bottom—when certain projects would be completed, crime rates, the longest and tallest and biggest. The videos were strangely riveting. The speed was doubled or tripled and fast music played. When we ran out of interstate videos, we watched others: kids recording a dust storm they called a white devil, a couple in a motorhome driving across the country. The man kept saying things like “Confidence is high” in a cheerful voice while the woman talked to the dog in her lap. Elise and I speculated about the nature of their troubles, but her phone died and she had to pass it up front to charge it.

In Arizona, everything looked different again. I felt like all of the people who were always talking about the homogenization of America were wrong—each place really
was
different. There were McDonald’s and Targets, but every town was full of different-looking people who had different accents and manners. In some places, the people said “Good morning” and “It’s nice to see you,” as if it wouldn’t be the first and last time they’d be seeing you, but twenty minutes down the road, the people might be cow-faced and unfriendly.

We were charmed by the cactuses, like giant hands reaching into the sky, and the camel at the dollar store where we stopped to buy Pepto-Bismol and toothpaste.

While our parents went inside, Elise and I stood in the parking lot watching a man give camel rides on the little stretch of dirt. I’d never seen a camel before. It was ugly and the humps were closer together than I’d imagined. A young girl, wedged between them, held up a hand and her mother took a picture. Elise took a picture of her mother taking a picture. And then Elise took a picture of me standing in front of the camel with my own hand raised, squinting below the enormously blue and cloudless sky.

We didn’t make it
to California. At two o’clock, our father stopped at a casino resort somewhere near Phoenix. He pulled the car into the circular drive and waved the valet driver off.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked. “It’s early.”

“I’m going to check the rates,” he said, getting out and taking the keys with him. There was a bounce in his step I hadn’t seen in days. We were quiet as we watched him walk through the door.

“This place looks nice,” I said.

“If you’re into big, generic casino resorts,” Elise said. “Which I am, don’t get me wrong. They’re a heck of a lot better than the places we’ve been staying.”

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“The deal with what?” our mother said.

“She means last night we stayed at a ghetto motel and now we’re at this luxury resort,” Elise said.

“No, I mean why are we stopping so early. I thought he wanted to make it to California.”

“He wants to gamble,” Elise said. “He’s desperate to get his hands on a slot machine.”

“He’s not going to gamble,” our mother said, though we all knew he’d step onto the casino floor and the lights and sounds would trigger something in his brain, and he’d sit for hours, slipping twenty-dollar bills into machines. For years, he’d been sneaking off to the Indian casino on Eddie Tullis Drive, a beige monstrosity that could have doubled as a medical clinic.

“He gambles all the time,” Elise said. “Everybody knows he gambles.”

“Everybody does
not
know,” our mother said. “I haven’t told anyone, and you shouldn’t either. It’s nobody’s business.”

“We’re not like you,” Elise said. “We don’t want to live like that.”

“Like what?”

“Lying—pretending we’ve got money when we don’t, that we’re these perfect Christians who never do anything wrong.”

“It’s not lying.”

“It’s deception,” Elise said.

“It’s our reputation,” our mother said.

“I don’t care about my reputation.”

“And it shows,” our mother said, which was possibly the meanest thing I’d ever heard her say to my sister.

Elise paused dramatically and said, “I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wanted.”

I picked up an empty popcorn bag and stuffed candy and gum wrappers into it, passed it up. My mother took it and held it. It would be no fun being a mother, everybody handing you their garbage and wanting things all the time, nobody to tell your problems to. She could never say anything bad about our family. She could only talk about other peoples’ problems as a way of talking about her own.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” my mother said. “It isn’t true.”

Elise was clutching her stomach. It occurred to me that I had no idea when the baby had been conceived; she could be a couple of weeks pregnant or several months. She might even be far enough along that she couldn’t have an abortion, and then what would we do? I imagined taking her to a clinic set up in somebody’s house, a woman bustling her inside before closing the door in my face, which was something I’d seen in a documentary. I didn’t know anything except what I’d seen on TV and I never retained the information I learned. When I watched those outdoor programs, I didn’t actually consider that one day I might be lost in the wild and need that stuff in order to survive. I thought about it, trying to recall something, and remembered the fat hippie saying I shouldn’t eat brightly colored things, that brightly colored things are usually poisonous. If I was ever hungry and found a neon green insect under a log, I wouldn’t make the mistake of eating it.

Our father got back in the car. “I got y’all your own room,” he said, handing us key cards. “Might as well enjoy ourselves on our last night.”

“That’s what the 9/11 hijackers thought,” Elise said. “They drank and got lap dances and then left a copy of the Qur’an on the bar.”

“I hope you’ll be with us,” our father said, buckling his seatbelt.

“I’ll be with you.”

“I sincerely hope.”

He drove through a maze of empty lots and parked, but a sign said no overnight parking so he backed out and kept winding around. It reminded me of that scene in
National Lampoon’s Vacation
when Chevy Chase and his family arrived at Walley-World. There wasn’t a single car in the lot and they parked so far away and Chevy Chase kept saying “First ones here!”

In the hotel
lobby, there was a water wall behind the check-in desk, the casino floor only steps away, dinging with bells and whistles. We walked past a coffee shop and an ice-cream parlor, stores selling dreamcatchers and turquoise jewelry, quilted bags in paisley prints. We passed a Mexican restaurant and a sundries shop. I thought I’d buy a postcard and mail it to Gabe—it occurred to me that I’d never bought a postcard before. I had never been far enough from home. You didn’t send someone a postcard from an adjoining state.

A man held the elevator and we got on. His wife was with him but he stared openly at Elise, and for the first time ever I was glad to be the unattractive sister. Who wanted to be stared at by ugly old men all the time? I wanted to kill him for her, wanted to kill all of them so she could live in peace.

Our parents got off at the sixth floor, followed by the man and his wife.

“We’re in 610,” our mother said, and the doors closed.

“Mom’s as miserable as we are,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling miserable at all. I was excited, nearly thrilled. We had our own room in a nice hotel. There was a pool and room service and I had enough money to buy a dreamcatcher if I wanted.

“Catholics don’t go in for this kind of stuff.”

“Uncle Albert does,” I said.

“Uncle Albert doesn’t count—if he wasn’t building a doomsday bunker, he’d be investing all his money in the Iraqi dinar or some other scheme. Don’t you remember when he tried to get Dad to invest in that black apartment complex?”

“No,” I said. “When was that?”

“A couple of years ago. It was a falling-apart slum.”

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“Mom tells me all sorts of things I don’t want to know,” she said. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“When?”

“At night after y’all go to sleep, we watch
The Young and the Restless
and she tells me everything. It’s terrible.”

“You should go to your room and read like I do.”

We turned a corner and walked a ways and then turned another corner and I knew I was going to have trouble finding my way back to the elevator. A cleaning lady stuck her head out of a room and we exchanged hellos. She was foreign but her hello had been perfected. I checked her cart for soaps and shampoos, but all of the best stuff had been hidden away somewhere.

We came to our room just as a tiny, severe woman opened the door across from ours and deposited a room service tray outside. She looked at me without any expression whatsoever. Her face was tight and smooth; it reminded me of a stone.

“Good afternoon,” I said. I liked saying “good morning” so much better.

She made a humph sound and closed her door.

“Real friendly around here,” I said, loudly.

Elise slid her key in, opened the door. Our room smelled like carpet cleaner, something that might be called Mountain Fresh or Ocean Breeze. We stood there with our bags, looking at an enormous whirlpool tub next to the king-sized bed.

“What is
this
?” she said. She stepped into the tub with her shoes on while I went into the bathroom. There was a shower and two sinks and a little TV, everything cool and white. I wanted to feel my bare feet on the tiles.

I flushed and washed my hands, walked around checking everything out. I opened drawers and closets, peeled the spread off the bed. Above it, there was a painting of two empty chairs on a beach. The picture bothered me—I didn’t like it when places pretended to be other places; if people had wanted to go to those other places, they would have gone to them. Why go to Las Vegas to be in Paris? If you wanted to go to Paris, go to Paris.

Elise stepped up and down like she was walking in some kind of muck. “Let’s put on our suits and get in.”

I opened the curtains. Our room faced a parking garage that gave off a ghostly blue light. “Check out this view.”

“You know the creepiest sound ever? A man whistling in a parking garage,” she said. “And they never whistle anything in particular, it’s just this random no-song whistling. They do it to creep people out—they know it creeps everybody out.”

I picked up the phone and called our parents. Our mother answered on the fourth ring. I asked if they had a whirlpool next to their bed, and she said that they did. I asked if they had a view of the parking garage and she said they had a view of the pool and then she said to come down to their room at six-thirty for supper and hung up.

Elise got in bed and tested out the pillows to see how high they were, if she was likely to get a crick. Then she went to the bathroom and peed with the door open.

“There’s a TV in here!” she called. “It looks like it’s from 1989.”

“I saw it.”

We didn’t know anything about 1989 but we referenced it a lot. It represented all of the movies we loved. It represented a time when the captain of the football team might actually fall in love with the homely red-haired girl, when they could make us believe it. I got in bed and Elise continued to talk to me from the bathroom.
Maybe we wouldn’t have to drive tomorrow and we could just stay here. And what
if the rapture actually happened and we got to watch it on TV? Wouldn’t that be kind of amazing? There were Aveda products! She loved Aveda products!
I got out of bed and turned on the water in the tub. The pressure was bad—it was going to take forever to fill up. I kept turning the knob but the water didn’t come out any faster. We could go down to the pool for an hour and come back and it still wouldn’t be filled.

“I’m going to get ice,” she said, clutching the bucket to her stomach.

“Okay, Dad.”

“Come here,” Elise
said, setting the bucket on the table.

“What?”

“Just come.”

I followed her to a room catty-corner from ours where a fat lady was sprawled on a king-sized bed, her purple dress bunched up like a tablecloth between her legs. Against one wall, there were four cages stacked on top of each other with two birds in each. Some of the birds were white and some were a pale, lovely pink.

“Mourning doves,” Elise said.

The woman sat up, excited to have visitors. “Hey, hon,” she said. “Come on in, make yourself at home.” She was truly massive, wonderfully enormous, but her face was oddly thin. “Have some cheese and fruit, if you want. We were just about to have a snack.”

“How’d you get the birds up here?” Elise asked.

“I tip people,” the woman said. “Whenever I go to hotels, I carry a lot of small bills. You give people a handful and they don’t even care if they’re all ones.”

The toilet flushed and a man came out of the bathroom. He was fat but not enormous, just normal fat, with a patchy beard.